In one of these, he is struck by a “portrait of a woman wearing a fur coat.” He is transfixed: Assiduously ignoring paternal directions which arrive periodically in the post, he wanders the streets and frequents art galleries. Instead, he learns German and devours books, especially Russian fiction. The core of Madonna in a Fur Coat is the account of a love affair between Raif, a feckless young man from Ankara who, addicted to romantic novels, has been sent by his father to Berlin to learn something useful like how to make luxury soap. Madonna in a Fur Coat, Sabahattin Ali, Maureen Freely (trans), Alexander Dawe (trans) (Penguin Classic, February 2017 Other Press,October 2017)

This has been something of a slow burn-Freely says the book had long been “the sort of book that passed from friend to friend”, and it has been in the been in the Turkish “top ten” lists for a decade, according to the agency that holds the rights, a period that overlaps perhaps not entirely coincidentally with the tenure of Prime Minister and now President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan-but it is nevertheless rather as if The Great Gatsby were outselling, if not Dan Brown, then Jonathan Franzen or Maya Angelou.

“It is,” continued Freely, “read, loved and wept over … most of all by young adults.” Yet in the past few years, the final novel of dissident Turkish author Sabahattin Ali has come into its own: this melancholic story of a doomed romance has for three years topped the Turkish bestseller lists, outselling-according to an account in the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet-Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s recent A Strangeness in My Mind by 50%. “When it was first published in Istanbul in 1943,” wrote Maureen Freely, one of the two translators of the recent English-language edition, in the Guardian, “it made no impression whatsoever.” Hence, it sets out to address Kürk Mantolu Madonna’s present popularity by examining, through different academic lenses, various types of evidence such as publishing history, customers’ reviews, and social and political contexts.M adonna in a Fur Coat has a backstory almost as long as the novel itself. This thesis is intrigued by the sudden, unexpected and unprecedented nature of the novel’s current becoming very popular. One of the most interesting aspects of Kürk Mantolu Madonna is that it was written over seven decades ago but over the last decade or so it has become extremely popular, exemplified by a myriad of posts about the novel on social media, in Turkey. Kürk Mantolu Madonna is a love story written in Turkish language by Sabahattin Ali, a Turkish journalist, poet and writer who is remembered for his Leftist political stance and articulated criticism towards the Turkish Republic’s Kemalist one-party state. How Could the Popularity of Kurk Mantolu Madona in Turkey over the Last Decade be Explained? Master thesis | Middle Eastern Studies (MA)

Kurk madonna